Walking the plank

Fellow hackers!

Running for DPL is like walking the plank: standing in the centre of
attention, a crowd watching your every move, the last steps before you fall
into the sea full of sharks of your own doubts: Will I live up to the
standards set before me?Will I be able to perform the duties bestowed
upon me?Will I have the courage and the strength to swim
through?Will I be enough?Will anyone follow my lead, and
walk the plank with me?

I have travelled long and far to be able to
stand on this plank today. It all started a little over a decade ago, when the
powers that be let me join Debian. I packaged
a few things, adopted
others, I played
an AM with somereasonablesuccess,
even contributed some useful
comments, started long-running, heated... discussions;
I made friends and enemies alike, I had the pleasure to work with brilliant
minds, but sadly, I disappointed others. And eventually, I disappeared.

But years later, when I emerged from the slumber and sought to restore my
former rank, to my surprise, I was welcomed. And even better, when I made it to
DebConf, I felt at home. I knew I have arrived. This vibrant community, this
strange mix of very different people working together was fascinating to see in
person.

This experience leads me to invite you now, to travel a road we
have not tread on before. The Debian empire, our distribution, with the vast
amount of packages we have, is already enormous. The raw manpower of hundreds
of volunteer hackers is something to be proud of. We're known for our technical
excellence, and bar a few mishaps, our quality.

These goals we have achieved, what else lies ahead then? Cooperation with
down- and upstream? That's already in progress, and while there's a lot
remaining to be done, there's no revolution necessary on that front, nor should
be any necessary. More packages, more packagers? A solved problem. More
non-packaging contributors? In progress! As always, improvements can and should
be made, but these are goals and wishes we have solutions for, which are on
track, even if they still need care, or are taking their first baby steps.

What then? What strange path do I want to open? What crazy idea does
this man standing on the plank have?

Unlikely to be a surprise, but what we lack is - and has always been -
manpower. Not raw, packaging manpower - with hundreds of people, we have that
covered. We lack people where we need them the most: our key projects, core
teams, where everyone fears to tread. There have been many improvements on this
front in recent years, quite a few teams received a healthy boost, but I
believe that the state of things, and especially the way we attract new
contributors can still be improved upon a lot.

My primary aim is to make Debian, as a project, able to attract passionate
talent from within the project, or from outside, or better yet: both. Not just
new blood, or brilliant minds - we're doing reasonably well on both fronts, and
been continuously improving. That part, I do not worry about.

I do worry about passion. I worry, that the contributors we attract will
eventually get bored, or burn out, and that's a problem. Keeping people
interested, motivated, and passionate is a challenge, and this
is an area I would like to improve on. To find the right people to run with the
flame, so to say, to lead the way and inspire the rest. To find ways, together
with the core teams and the rest of the project, to make tasks in desperate
need of manpower more attractive, more rewarding.

I do not, however, campaign to make Debian "fun". From where
I'm standing, it has been fun for the past decade. No. I'm campaigning for a
bit more... charm, if so you prefer. I long to see the day when reading bits
from the various teams is actually a good, entertaining (not necessarily
funny!) read, not just a dry list of bullet points. While to-the-point
announcements of such nature are useful and interesting to those who are
already involved in the respective teams, it's much harder to digest for those
who are not. If these updates, these periodic news and bits and pieces could be
also used to attract more contributors... wouldn't that be impressive?

We're very good at software, we're unparalleled when it comes to packaging, and
we improved a lot in our communications and publicity, but our attempts at
recruitment are - I believe - lacking. While there were and are attempts,
someone new to this free software world would still find Debian intimidating. I
wish to change that, to make our routine communications accessible too. I'd
love to see well-written, appealing requests for help, with just the right
amount of technical and non-technical balance. This is something I've been
experimenting with as part of my involvement in this year's GSoC,
so far, I believe, usefully. But there's certainly a lot to improve upon,
still.

But! I recognise I've been babbling about far too long, and this introduction
already stretches too far, so lets sum all of the above up in a few boring
bullet points (which will also serve as a good example of why I much prefer the
less formal, free flow of thought used until this point)!

Mouse in the sea

Who am I?

I am but a simple hacker, a little mouse behind the keyboard, mostly known by
my nick: algernon. I was born.. a while ago, a little less than three times the
time that ticked away since I first joined Debian. Offline, I have
"Gergely Nagy" printed on official documents, and some people
strangely prefer to call me by that name, over my nickname.

I've done a few interesting things in my career as a programmer: I wrote a
Makefile so scary that I still shiver when I look back at it. I worked as a
sysadmin, wrote perl scripts, reinvented the wheel three times in a row. I
hacked on video streaming software, and nowadays I'm enjoying the eventful life
of a software engineer at BalaBit's support department, and spend a bit of my
paid time working on syslog-ng, dreaming up crazy stuff like animating one's flow of logs.

My Debian work so far

I went the usual route of a Debian Developer: packaged a few pieces, adopted a
few others, wrote some of my own (one of which I'm still trying
to rid the world of). I worked as an application manager for a while, enjoyed
most of it, and as did many, burned out in the end. During those early days, I
contributed a little here and there, too. The exact details escape me by now,
but the BTS should have my name all around the place.

Since I rejoined the project, I've been watching debian-bugs-dist@ like a hawk,
looking for misfiled bugs to handle, or to chime in to discussions I found
interesting. I contributed some minor code here and there, came up with dh-exec and am now part of the
GSoC admin team.

My goals

My goals are, I believe, well explained above, I do not wish to repeat it
again, as there is no other way to put it. However, I do want to emphasise,
that all the great work the DPLs in the past years have been doing, are worth
doing, and I will do my best, if elected, to follow in their footsteps, and if
possible, improve upon their ways, along with pursuing my own vision.

To achieve my goal of fuelling passion, the tools and accessories are already
available, the opportunities are already present, waiting to be exploited, they
just all need some ignition. I'd like to oversee that, and watch the world burn
in desire to spend a lifetime hacking on Debian.

But I'm getting carried away - apologies!

The key to my goal is communication, search for talent and passion, and the
finding a way to keep these going. A hard task, and a vague one at that, too.
But unfortunately, I work mostly by instinct, driven by experience. This proved
to be valuable at my day job, I'm confident I can exploit the diverse
experience I picked up over the years to further Debian's goals.

Why am I fit to lead?

I have nearly no previous experience in leadership. But I worked under many
different leaders, both within the context of Debian, and outside of it. I
worked under terrible leaders, weak ones and strong, stubborn fighters. I have
seen and felt all the goods and all the wrongs they can make, and I have
learned - I hope.

The experience of having worked under very different leaders, on very different
projects gives me an ample pool of knowledge, to see how leadership should
work, and what mistakes to avoid.

As I rely on the years of experience I picked up when I'm hacking, I'm
confident I can similarly rely on it if elected for DPL.

Additional info

I'm hoping that during the campaign period, a lot of questions will be asked,
about things I forgot, or simply did not think worthy to mention.

There's only one thing I want to remind people who read this far about: unlike
last time, I'm
playing to win, despite the perhaps unusual format of this platform.

Reflections

As is custom, in this section, I would like to speak a few words about the
platforms this year - about Zack's and Wouter's and my own too.

Stefano Zacchiroli

Zack's platform is... interesting. On one hand, it's a clear and well done
platform, with specific plans listed and ways to achieve them.

On the other hand, looking at the two bullet points in the preamble, the
highest priority goal seems to be ensuring that there is a smooth transition to
a new DPL next year, and that he can finish the pending projects he's been
guiding the past two years.

Both goals are commendable, and the pending projects will need to be brought to
completion aswell. However, I could imagine a better scenario to achieve all
these goals than reelecting Stefano: change the DPL now, and delegate Stefano
to guide his projects to completion: he's obviously the most appropriate person
to do that, giving him a free hand would be a smart move in my opinion.

This way, Zack can see the pending projects brought to completion, take a huge
load of work off the shoulders of the DPL (and with this, easing the
transition), and time permitting, even work together with the DPL to make the
transition even smoother.

Since his calls for volunteers to participate in DPL-ish tasks failed in the
past, I believe turning things around a bit, and letting someone else sit on
the throne and get his hands dirty, with the former DPL guiding his steps would
yield better results.

Wouter Verhelst

From reading Wouter's platform, I get the impression that we share similar
ideas, which is great, because that means all three candidates are pretty much
on the same page, give or take a few smaller differences.

However, there's something I miss from his platform, something I find hard to
pin-point... perhaps a lack of a Bigger Plan? Same thing I miss from Stefano's
platform. Perhaps it's not even in mine.

Nevertheless, I think a DPL should not only think within the constraints of a
one-year term, but have a vision that points past that. I don't see that in
Wouter's platform, and it certainly isn't in Zack's, either.

Gergely Nagy

My own platform was - and still is - a bit of an experiment, and as such,
wasn't entirely clear, and had only a few answers to the "How?"
questions.

I believed that the hows do not necessarily belong to the platform, there's a
campaigning period to discuss and refine them. I wouldn't want to put
bullet-pointed plans into a static platform, that will be indexed and
searchable for years to come. I'd rather discuss the hows on a mailing list,
that's more interactive. Nevertheless, some generic ideas were part of my
platform, just not down to a bullet-pointed action plan.

Another thing I heard criticised - although the question wasn't raised publicly
yet - is that my platform gave the impression that we already have sufficient
packaging manpower. We don't. What I intended to imply, is that we have a
reasonable inflow of new contributors (though, that can, and certainly must be
improved) and new packages, that we're on a good track here. What we lack, is
coordinating that manpower we have, and concentrating it to areas where work is
still needed. This, in turn, fits into my desire of making people even more
passionate about what they do.